While no one will stop you from stowing batteries on your own aircraft, the U.S. Department of Transportation has banned all loose batteries from checked baggage on airline and charter flights for reasons that seem just as applicable to privately owned jets.

What can you do now to increase your survival chances should the unthinkable occur on one of your flights? "Be aware and be prepared is the best advice I can give a passenger," said Cyndee Irvine, who was a PSA Airlines flight attendant for 10 years and has been a contract flight attendant for the past decade.

Before you fly, take a moment to consider whether you risk spreading disease to fellow passengers-or vice versa. "People know tuberculosis, colds and flu are contagious," said Dr. David Streitwieser, medical director for MedAire's MedLink Service.

If your car is less than 10 years old, there might be a little computer buried somewhere inside that records events. If you're in a crash, the police, the insurance adjustor, or maybe even the National Transportation Safety Board will retrieve that computer, download its data and use it to figure out exactly what happened.

Is it safe to use cellphones and other personal electronics on airplanes?
It depends on whom you ask, but researchers at Carnegie Mellon University say that the cacophony of electronic "noise" emitted by portable devices brought onboard by passengers indeed can cause dangerous interference with navigation sensors in the cockpit.

Business jet pilots dedicate themselves to safety, but also to delivering passengers to their destinations on time. Occasionally, the latter goal interferes with the former and the folks in the cockpit take risks you might view as, well, overly risky.

Over the last decade, business aviation safety has improved immensely. During that time, regulators have attempted to reduce accidents by introducing a variety of equipment, avionics and procedural requirements.

"I must have been unconscious for two or three minutes," recalled Dean Mortimer, president of Ontario, Canada's Cloud Air charter service. "I woke up looking upside down at the bottom of the lake, yet inexplicably I released my seat belt and fell headfirst to the roof of the aircraft."

Pages

Quote/Unquote

“What we need to do is always lean into the future. When the world changes around you and when it changes against you—what used to be a tail wind is now a head wind—you have to lean into that and figure out what to do because complaining isn’t a strategy.
”